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(I know it’s not Sunday, but I was going through my drafts and found this, so thought I’d finish and publish it)

My husband and I have a particular fondness for breakfast foods. We love cooked breakfasts, and really enjoy having people over to share breakfast with us. Finding breakfast to share with a 9 month old can be quite tough. You don’t really want to give her too much bacon, it’s quite hard for her to eat pancakes, she can’t have cows milk…

French toast, or eggy bread, is insanely easy to make. Simply coat day-old bread in raw egg and fry it. The berry sauce is easy too, all you need to do is heat up a tin of berries in juice with a teaspoon of sugar or honey, and stir it until it’s a nice gloopy texture. And of course, for fried bananas you…fry some bananas. Angus and I also had bacon and maple syrup. French toast with all the trimmings is so yummy, yummy, yummy.

If I’m honest, Angus is actually the better cook out of the two of us. He just seems to be more successful at it more often, and I think he enjoys cooking more than I do, too. So often, if he’s home, I’ll start out cooking dinner and he’ll take over. Sometimes he’ll just insist on cooking dinner and kick me right out of the kitchen until it’s ready.

This was one of those evenings. I could smell whatever he was cooking, and I knew it was going to be so, so yummy. I was right. What was for dinner?

Sausages, peas and vegetable mash

We tend not to buy meat from the supermarket. We get home kill beef and pork once a year, as well as venison several times a year, and that usually lasts us almost the entire year. The sausages were beef, and I think they were actually the last of the home kill sausages.

This was Madelyn’s first time eating peas. Her pincer grip has really developed, and she gets so excited about being able to pick up each individual pea and put it in her mouth. It’s also exciting to spit them back out again.

The sausages and peas were, well, just sausages and peas. It was the vegetable mash that was really special, and it was that which I could smell as he was cooking it. It had potatoes, kumara, capsicum, carrots and onion in it, all mashed up together. The onion had been caramalised, so it was especially tasty. Madelyn loved it, too, and it was so easy for her to eat because she didn’t have to chew it. Definitely a winner for baby-led weaning dinner.

Angus was working late last Thursday, so Madelyn and I just had a simple, lazy dinner.

I threw together some pasta, cooked capsicum and cooked cherry tomatoes with some tomato and roasted garlic tomato pasta sauce (the sauce was just from a jar). Madelyn had the pasta, raw cherry tomatoes and lightly cooked capsicum without any pasta sauce.

She also had some cucumber and pear. Pears are a funny thing to have with pasta, I know, but we have fruit bowls on the dining table and I always eat heaps of it once I’ve finished dinner. If I pick up something she wants, she’ll reach out towards it, so I give it to her. She wanted some pear with her dinner.

I know it’s not much, but when you’re just cooking for one adult and a baby who will probably throw most of it on the floor (or stuff it under her legs, which is her new thing) anyway, you don’t tend to go to too much effort. Pasta with vegetables and half a jar of pasta sauce is a winner for dinner when the husband is away.

Madelyn is 6 months old this month, and that means that she can, if she wants to, start eating people food! We’ve decided to do Baby-Led Weaning with her, where she essentially decides what and how to eat. This means no purees, just finger foods and shapes that are easy for little hands to grasp. We offer her two to four choices at every meal (usually off our plates), and she decides what she wants to eat first.

There hasn’t been anything yet that she hasn’t eaten. She doesn’t particularly like broccoli. The first time she tried it, she put it in her mouth and then promptly threw it on the ground. But even though she doesn’t love it, it is one of the only foods I have seen come out the other end (a good indicator of what she’s actually eating verses what is just getting mashed in her hands and hair and on the floor). She’s a fruity girl. She loves mandarins, pineapple, pears, banana and apples. Her favourite vegetable is green beans. She also likes kumara, pumpkin, mushrooms and potato. She’s not too sure about carrots, cauliflower and cheese. She loves minced beef, but it’s hard to know what she thinks of corned beef and chicken, because those were harder to eat. She’s tried cucumber and avocado too. And then there’s all the sneaky things she’s tried – quiche, pancakes, a french fry, grilled cheese on toast, yoghurt, cruskits, pasta. Oh, and she loves to drink out of her little sippy cup.

I’d never seen Baby-Led Weaning in action before, so it’s been really interesting. It’s incredible how adept she is at biting and chewing, especially considering she has no teeth. I cook her vegetables, but not her fruit, and it’s surprising, but she can even eat apple. A few people who have seen her eat have really struggled to grasp the concept of letting her feed herself. It is hard, being so used to seeing babies eat purees, to accept that babies can eat perfectly fine on their own. But I have to be really careful that people don’t break off little pieces and put them in her mouth, because that is when choking happens. As long as she is in control of what and how much goes in her mouth, her gag refluxes (which are really far forward on the tongue in young babies) will usually protect her.

It’s so fascinating to watch her discover food. She gets excited about eating now, she loves it so much.

The bean greens make me laugh. I promise she does this on her own. So cute!

For more on Baby-Led Weaning, and more photos of Madelyn discovering food, head over to milky cuddles